The Affordable Housing Thread

[58rhodes]

^ thanks for the info!!

[MarkDaMan]

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

these are all great opportunities for incoming workers, these are not the people or jobs Im talking about. Im also aware that our developers build elsewhere. But ask anybody across the country about the job market reputation in Portland . I doubt if 2% of the total job market works in the apparel business.

You say 2% like it's a bad thing. 2% in a major metropolitan is a large amount of jobs. Tens of thousands of middle class or better jobs.

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

Im also aware that our developers build elsewhere. But ask anybody across the country about the job market reputation in Portland .

I travel across the country for both for work and pleasure. Most people talk about Portland like it's some utopian heaven.

[58rhodes]

Originally Posted by MarkDaMan

You say 2% like it's a bad thing. 2% in a major metropolitan is a large amount of jobs. Tens of thousands of middle class or better jobs.



I travel across the country for both work and pleasure. Most people talk about Portland like it's some utopian heaven.

Im not here to argue with anybody but I guess I see a bit different Portland than some. I work in the property management business and deal with all types of people of all incomes in all parts of the city.The picture on the street is a bit different than what I see here. I find lots of newcomers disappointed but I suppose you could find that anywhere. I agree that the job market is better than it has been but its still not good. I guess it would be nice to accommodate some of the life long locals especially beyond 82nd ave.

BTW Portland is a nicer town than a lot of other places but is still not quite a Utopian Heaven------we still have many many problems.

[MarkDaMan]

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

Most of the new high paying jobs in the area are filled with transplants and I guess it would be nice to accommodate some of the life long locals especially beyond 82nd ave.

You post this as fact, please post your data to support this statement.

I'd like to think our comments on this forum are fact based. Otherwise we are no better than "Preserve our Pearl Views".

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

BTW Portland is a nicer town than a lot of other places but is still not quite a Utopian Heaven------we still have many many problems.

Totally agree, I haven't said otherwise.

[soleri]

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

Im not here to argue with anybody but I guess I see a bit different Portland than some. I work in the property management business and deal with all types of people of all incomes in all parts of the city.The picture on the street is a bit different than what I see here. I find lots of newcomers disappointed but I suppose you could find that anywhere. I agree that the job market is better than it has been but its still not good. I guess it would be nice to accommodate some of the life long locals especially beyond 82nd ave.

BTW Portland is a nicer town than a lot of other places but is still not quite a Utopian Heaven------we still have many many problems.

I'm only partly understanding your point but I still want to respond to it. Portland has been changing over the past 40 years, first from a blue-collar town to a kind of hipster town and artisanal paradise, and now to a more expensive coastal city for refugees from San Francisco, LA, and Phoenix. If you've lived here a long time, there's a good chance you might resent some these changes, particularly housing costs along with the whole driving/parking issue. For many natives, it doesn't feel like home anymore.

I'll confess I'm one of those people who moved here and contributed to this disconcerting change. I wanted to live in a city that wasn't destroyed by cars, where character and good bones defined the city better than sports' franchises and local TV news anchors. The week after I moved here I sold my car. I marveled how easy it was to get around, how great downtown was, and how wonderful those neighborhood commercial districts are. Portland, of course, is not utopia, but if you grew up and spent your whole life in some sunbelt sprawl-town, it comes pretty damn close. If we exaggerate its good points or ignore the contradictory evidence on file, well, it's easy to understand why.

Change is the only constant but I want Portland to prosper in ways that maintain its quality of life. Yes, it's going to be more crowded, which also means more cars and higher housing costs. But it if we play this right, it can still be a reasonably great place for lots of people, including newcomers. The answer is not to damn Portland as elitist or inauthentic according to some native's rulebook. It's to help every city in America recover its lost urban magic. Portland leads by example, one that is condemned by many people on the right who think we should all drive and live in lookalike housing pods with chain restaurants and big-box stores on eight-lane roads relentlessly dividing what used to be farmland and are now called cities (without any apparent irony).

95% of Americans live in places that could be anywhere. Portland is not one of those places. Granted, it's not utopia. It's actually real.

[maccoinnich]

Originally Posted by mhays

1. City of Seattle voters continue to keep the a low-income and affordable housing levy going, providing $16,000,000 per year that mostly goes to nonprofits who build and own housing.

Thanks for your great post mhays. I wasn't previously aware of the Seattle Housing Levy. I wish this was something that was even on the agenda for Portland.

[PDXDENSITY]

Originally Posted by maccoinnich

Thanks for your great post mhays. I wasn't previously aware of the Seattle Housing Levy. I wish this was something that was even on the agenda for Portland.

We need better mechanisms for affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning with linkage fees works, too.

[58rhodes]

not quite about affordable housing but on topic with my earlier point

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/in...collars_i.html

[mhays]

You're welcome 58rhodes and maccoinnich.

[colganc]

Originally Posted by 58rhodes

not quite about affordable housing but on topic with my earlier point

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/in...collars_i.html

Increasing the 25th percentile income will make housing more affordable. If 50k jobs were a dime a dozen housing would be affordable. Heck, we would see high rise apartments amd condos sprouting like trees.

If space is restricted by he UGB and thus forces higher cost housing, the only other option to truly make housing affordable is inceeasing income. Any zoning rules or subsidies is taking money from one person and giving it to another (in one form or another). Increasing income for 25th percentile and above would do wonders and actually increase the pool of wealth in Portland.

The biggest question I have about Portland's future is the transition from our tradtionally manufacturing base to a services based economy. If it can happen then maybe things will work out, otherwise I wonder where the jobs will come rom when as you allude to by posting a link to that article, we shun any "trafitional" business we've had.

Edit: I may have the income percentile backwards. I want the percentile that covers 75% of the population. Do I have. The percentile backwards?

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by maccoinnich

Rents increased dramatically in the early years of this decade due to a huge shortage of housing created by the recession. Now that the construction industry is building at the high rates needed we're seeing rents stabilize or decline slightly.

Originally Posted by soleri

Big rental buildings like the Vista St Clair and 735 St Clair used to have waiting lists. Now they're offering incentives to residents who can find a friend or family member who will rent there. That's what happens when 25% of your units are vacant. There is no crisis in Portland when it comes to supply.

What comments like this ignore (whether inadvertently or by design) is that tens of thousands of Portlanders have already been priced out of the market by gentrification over the last couple decades. They're not bidding up the prices of new construction, obviously, because they could never afford it.

It may be perfectly true that there's no supply crisis in Portland from a developer's perspective. When 25% of their top-market units are vacant is when they decide they've built enough. What happens at the lower end of the market is of no concern to them. And yet affordable housing advocates tell us there's still a shortage of 40,000 affordable units. Far too many of those housed are crowded into neighborhoods that lack the infrastructure or public services to support them, in places like Aloha or Gresham or outer East Portland. And the homeless population is in the thousands.

Compare average rental prices to incomes and it ought to be clear that 'stabilizing rental prices' at their current levels is unacceptable. From a Trib article from last year:

72 percent of Portland renters who earn less than $50,000 a year were paying more than the recommended ceiling of 30 percent of their income for housing.... [A]mong renters making 30 percent of the median income — about $20,500 — seven of 10 households spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

'Stabilizing' such a status quo for such a great many folks is just unacceptable.

Originally Posted by mhays

1. City of Seattle voters continue to keep the a low-income and affordable housing levy going, providing $16,000,000 per year that mostly goes to nonprofits who build and own housing.

2. The Seattle Housing Authority and its nonprofit and for-profit partners are in the home stretch on rebuilding their old single-income zones into denser mixed-income zones. Generally they go from maybe six per acre to 11 or so. When you take light rail from the airport you pass two of these, Rainier Vista and New Holly, both very successful. The last one is Yesler Terrace next to Downtown, which will replace 590(?) garden-type units with maybe 3,000 plus some commercial use, with the first few hundred units underway or just completing.

Great contribution to this discussion, mhays. Question for Portland forumers: does Portland even have a Housing Authority? If so, you don't hear about it much do you? Here's one thing I'm pretty sure about: 3,000 plus new public housing units (just one project!) would dwarf the numbers of public and 'affordable' units currently being built in our city.

I recently attended a talk about council housing (that is, public housing) in London. During the 1970s, new public housing was being built in London at a rate of something like 30,000 units a year. (To be fair, taxes were a lot higher then, too). This is around the time we started to hear from people like Hayek and Friedman that the government shouldn't be involved in supplying things that the private sector can take care of, that public investment was 'crowding out' private investment. So once Thatcher rose to power in the UK, public housing construction largely ground to a halt, and the government took measures that led to the privatization of much of London's existing public housing stock. And guess what? The private sector didn't pick up the slack. London rents now beggar the imagination.

And posts like soleri's make it obvious why this is perfectly consistent with market logic, and why, if you believe that housing is a human right, if you believe in something like a 'right to the city', then we shouldn't even be talking about housing as though it were an ordinary commodity. Of course I agree that raising Portland-area incomes would help with affordability, and I think that allowing more development in neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family detached homes would help... but at the end of the day, will a private market for housing ever be more equitable or 'efficient' than a private market for healthcare?

[mhays]

I should clarify the 3,000 at Yesler Terrace, on 28 acres on the hill over Downtown proper. They're more than replacing the WWII-era low-income units, and also making it mixed-income. The EIS and master plan accommodate up to 5,000 units, but it looks like the market-rate portion will be moderate vs. high density, and I've heard a new grand total of 3,000 plus some office use etc. The first three sites will be I think 700 units of woodframe housing by Vulcan. The "workforce" unit count might have changed too.

The vision on the SHA website:
•661 units serving people with incomes below 30 percent Average Median Income, consisting of 561 units to replace those currently there and 100 additional units developed with partners
•290 additional low-income units serving people with incomes from 30-60 percent AMI
•850 workforce housing serving people with incomes below 80 percent AMI
•1,200-3,200 market-rate housing units

[soleri]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

What comments like this ignore (whether inadvertently or by design) is that tens of thousands of Portlanders have already been priced out of the market by gentrification over the last couple decades. They're not bidding up the prices of new construction, obviously, because they could never afford it.

It may be perfectly true that there's no supply crisis in Portland from a developer's perspective. When 25% of their top-market units are vacant is when they decide they've built enough. What happens at the lower end of the market is of no concern to them. And yet affordable housing advocates tell us there's still a shortage of 40,000 affordable units. Far too many of those housed are crowded into neighborhoods that lack the infrastructure or public services to support them, in places like Aloha or Gresham or outer East Portland. And the homeless population is in the thousands.

Compare average rental prices to incomes and it ought to be clear that 'stabilizing rental prices' at their current levels is unacceptable.
'Stabilizing' such a status quo for such a great many folks is just unacceptable.

As MHays pointed out, liberal Seattle has a significant affordability problem even with a designated levy on new units intended to assuage that very problem. The issue here, however, is that none of us is the Philosopher King of Portland. We can't simply decide to build more affordable housing absent the political will to do so. You can't arbitrarily upzone neighborhoods for apartment blocks. You can't set aside entire neighborhoods as ethnic enclaves either. You may be frustrated that this is the case but I wouldn't take it personally since no one person has the power to change these things.

Our opinions are only useful insofar as they illuminate actual reality as opposed to one's own lofty ideals. It's pointless to grandstand on this issue since you are preaching to a choir of urbanists who are in large agreement about the desirability of affordable housing along with demographic diversity. It's rather silly on your part to assume I'm frustrating any achievable goal when it comes to affordable housing in Portland. Believe me, I'm way to the left of the average Portlander. Don't worry about me. Worry about convincing the average Portlander although I recommend something other than high dudgeon as a persuasion technique.

[maccoinnich]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

Question for Portland forumers: does Portland even have a Housing Authority? If so, you don't hear about it much do you?

Yes, it does: the Portland Housing Bureau. They don't directly operate public housing, but they do partner with non profits and help fund new affordable housing. Some current projects they're involved in include: the Abigail (127 units; under construction); Riverplace Parcel 3 (RFP out right now); Glisan Commons Phase I (67 units, opened last year?); Glisan Commons Phase II (60 units, just opened); Miracles Central (47 units; about to start construction). Without the Portland Housing Bureau and its predecessor bodies you wouldn't have a situation where 30% of the housing in the Pearl is low income housing.

There's also the Home Forward, which used to be known as the Housing Authority of Portland. Despite the old name they operate Multnomah County wide. They administer Section 8 vouchers for the region and directly operate public housing.

[2oh1]

Originally Posted by maccoinnich

Yes, it does: the Portland Housing Bureau. They don't directly operate public housing, but they do partner with non profits and help fund new affordable housing. Some current projects they're involved in include: the Abigail (127 units; under construction); Riverplace Parcel 3 (RFP out right now); Glisan Commons Phase I (67 units, opened last year?); Glisan Commons Phase II (60 units, just opened); Miracles Central (47 units; about to start construction). Without the Portland Housing Bureau and its predecessor bodies you wouldn't have a situation where 30% of the housing in the Pearl is low income housing.

There's also the Home Forward, which used to be known as the Housing Authority of Portland. Despite the old name they operate Multnomah County wide. They administer Section 8 vouchers for the region and directly operate public housing.

Part of the problem here is linguistic. What does the term "affordable housing" mean? There's a huge gap between market rate and section 8. Does somebody who makes $30,000 qualify for section 8?

Can somebody smart help me out with a bit of math here?

What is a typical hourly wage for retail workers in Multnomah County? I know that's a broad category, but still... I'm just trying to get a feel for the numbers. What's a typical hourly wage, and what does that amount to as a monthly take home pay after taxes, and everything else that's taken out before it becomes a paycheck? What about somebody who makes $35,000 a year? What's their monthly take home pay? What about somebody who makes $50,000? What's their monthly take home pay? What's a teacher's starting salary like these days, in terms of what he or she takes home each month? It's easier to get a feel for whether or not housing is affordable when we've got a feel for how much money people bring home in a given month.

I'm asking because I feel like there's a disconnect between the term "Affordable Housing" and the concept of housing that's affordable. Often, the term is used to mean housing for the poor - and yes absolutely the poor need housing - but I'm wondering about all of those people who fall in-between. They're not technically poor, but they're not earning what it takes these days to pay market rate rent.

[maccoinnich]

Typically affordable housing is restricted to people earning a certain percentage of area Median Family Income. For instance somewhere like Bud Clark Commons is catering to those earning 0-30% of MFI (and probably mostly at the 0% level), and as such requires deep public subsidy to build and operate.

The Sitka apartments by contrast has 72 units available to those earning no more than 50% MFI and 131 apartments available to those earning no more than 60% MFI. These are people with jobs, just not particularly high paying ones. In 2015 60% MFI works out to $31,260 for a household of one. That person could rent a one bedroom apartment at the Sitka for $636 a month. That's a very good deal, which is why the waiting lists for that building are so long.

The affordable units at Sky3 will be available to those earning up to 80% MFI. Because the people who are eligible for those units make more money the apartments will cost more - $923 for a one bedroom apartment. This type of affordable housing gets the least amount of public dollars. As far as I know the construction of that building is entirely privately financed, but the City will forego the ongoing property tax revenue from it.

[maccoinnich]

Interesting that Portland's policy of using TIF money to fund affordable housing is a lot more successful than the methods employed by some of our peer cities.

The 5 Myths About Portland Apartments



The accusations ring out in bars. The gripes spill onto Internet comment threads. And the complaints echo like angry yodels down the newly built canyons of Southeast Division Street and North Williams Avenue.

The backlash against Portland’s apartment boom runs deep, if not silent. And the myths people voice are as predictable as sneering hatred of Californians.

The case goes like this:

Fancy new apartments are making the city more expensive. Renters are being kicked out of cheap houses so greedy developers can smash them and build grotesquely oversized homes.

We need rent control to quell the skyrocketing prices.

...continues at the Willamette Week.

[Zihua]

Great article!

[Abide]

Originally Posted by maccoinnich

Interest that Portland's policy of using TIF money to fund affordable housing is a lot more successful than the methods employed by some of our peer cities.

That was indeed interesting. A very coherent article.

[2oh1]

I hate when articles are written that act like neighborhoods don't exist, suggesting that Portland's border with Gresham is the same as downtown, Brooklyn, Inner SE, etc.

Let's blow a hole through their very first argument:

"Myth 1: New apartments are raising the cost of rent."

Fact: New high rise housing in a neighborhood increases the population in and desirability of a neighborhood.

Higher population = more opportunities for shops and bars.
More shops and bars = a hipper, more vibrant neighborhood.
Hipper neighborhood = more people wanting to live there.
More people wanting to live there = higher rent, because landlords see increasing competition for their apartments, which means they can charge more.

The basic theory that new homes don't raise the price of rent always looks at the city as a whole, but it neglects to mention (or simply couldn't give a rats a** about) the fact that real people get priced out and pushed out of their neighborhoods.

Inner SE is the perfect example.

A decade ago, inner SE was mostly run down. It was easy to find a 1 bedroom renting for under $800 in inner SE. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $969 today. But $1500+ is the new normal, even at older buildings.

But the author of that article sees Portland as one big place. So what if you get priced out of your neighborhood? There are still bargains to be found out toward Gresham - forget the fact that as people from the inner city get priced out and start moving outward, they price out people who've been living in the neighborhoods they're moving into.

To be clear: I am very strongly pro development. But over the past decade, rent in parts of Portland has doubled even though inflation has only increased by 20%. In 2005, if you were willing to hunt, it wasn't hard to find 1 bedrooms in downtown, inner SE, and NW for as little as $750. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $908 today. But those same apartments, which are now a decade older, easily rent for $1500 today. I am very strongly pro development. But I'm concerned about the escalating price of rent. And I'm concerned about the growing disconnect between affordable housing and the word Affordable. These days, Affordable Housing means housing for the poor rather than housing that's affordable, and there's a huge chunk of the middle class getting lost in the gap.